Complete Short Fiction, page 454
. . . On the viewplate, she watched Jono as he came along the corridor. He had his robe on. The cord fastening it was not well tied, for his body kept showing through as he strode rapidly along. As he passed under one of the camera eyes, she had a glimpse of his speckled eyes and shuddered. They looked—she couldn’t decide—eager, even gleeful.
She supposed that was the way a rapist would look, and feel.
She picked him up on another, a night-view camera, as he entered the bedchamber. What now, she wondered. Apparently, nothing unusual. The shadowy figure walked over to the bed, twisted out of the robe, stooped and seemed to disappear. Presumably, in the darkness he crawled in under the sheets and on top of the woman who was there. Small sounds came from the bed, ending in a woman’s soft moan.
Moments later, the figure withdrew and there he was—Jono—as she picked him up in the corridor heading back to his office.
She pressed the button that signalled to Dr. Toh that the way was clear for his entry. And so she waited while he also came—and went.
Sitting before the bank of watching instruments, Lasia had an uneasy sense that the experiment now depended on Dr. Jono’s reports, and not on anything that she herself had actually done. And, of course, Dr. Toh would be heading home by now and would soon be getting the sleep he needed to prepare him for the next strenuous day of a sex-retraining psychologist.
Lasia waited, half-anticipating that Mrs. Jono would be up and off for home before her husband got there. When, after many minutes, no one else came out of the bedroom and the light did not go on, the girl sighed, turned off her instruments and walked a back corridor route to the experimental chamber.
—Opened the door, switched on the light, went over to the bed . . . and stared down with widened eyes at the strangled woman who lay dead in a tangle of bed sheets—
The judge pounded with his gavel. The jury of four men and eight women smiled brightly. The trial of lasia, as an accessory to and instigator of murder, began.
On the witness stand, Jono stated that Lasia had come to him with the proposal for the experiment, and that he had accepted, and had agreed to have his wife play the role of victim.
Dr. Toh’s story was even simpler. He had not known who the woman was. He had simply undertaken the role of a control, and departed.
The defense attorney, in his cross-examination, said, “Doctor, I am having a hard time grasping the thought that you could make love to the body of a dead woman and not know it.”
“She was still warm,” said Dr. Toh.
“But so limp and unresponsive?”
“Many women are very passive in the sex act,” said the expert.
“Would you say that this one was sort of extra passive?”
“I intended to comment on it in my report.”
As Lasia came to the stand, she noticed that Tinker had entered the courtroom. She called to him quickly, “Tinker, do you know anything about this matter? Where were you?”
Tinker was explaining what it knew when the judge said sharply, “Will the defendant please explain who she is talking to?”
“Tinker,” Lasia said.
All the men in the courtroom, including the judge, smiled tolerantly. The judge bent toward her. “What is Tinker’s reply to your question?” he asked.
“Tinker says he killed the woman because she was going to shoot at him with a glid.”
“With a glid?” echoed the judge.
“It’s a little instrument for killing Tinkers. I have one myself.” Lasia fumbled in her purse and produced the tiny cube. She handed it to the deputy district attorney, who looked at it blankly and then, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, walked over to the bench and laid it before the judge.
The judge eyed the glistening object. Then, tentatively, he put his finger on it. Then hastily removed his finger. “It’s warm,” he said in a querulous tone. “How does it work?”
“You squeeze it between the thumb and a finger,” Lasia explained.
“Oh!”
Silence, then, while His Honor stared down at the cube. Finally, “Do you point it and squeeze?”
“No. You just squeeze. It kills all bad Tinkers that are nearby.”
“Oh, yes,” said the judge vaguely, “bad Tinkers.
“That was the trouble,” said Lasia, “This was a good Tinker. And so, when Mrs. Jono tried to kill it, naturally that couldn’t happen. So it had to kill her.” Her pretty face tightened into a frown. “I can’t imagine what got into her because we were all told the difference when we were given the glid.”
The judge’s face had a puzzled expression, even a bewildered one. “Where did you get this, uh, glid?”
“When the Tinkers landed they gave a Kolo pipe to every man on Earth and a glid to every woman.”
The judge ceased puffing on his Kolo pipe, took it out of his mouth, looked at it fondly and said, “Oh, yes, of course.” Lasia explained, “When a bad Tinker smells a Kolo pipe, he leaves right away. But, of course, the second race on Earth would be adversely affected if they smoked Kolos, so—”
“The second race?” puzzled the judge.
“Women.”
“Oh.” Wide eyes.
“So we got glids to protect us.”
The judge glanced over at the jury. The four men were smoking Kolos. The women—
The judge gulped. “Do all eight of you jury women have glids?”
There was a visible ripple of hesitation. Then the forewoman stood up and said, “Your Honor, we were told not to show our glid except when necessary.”
“But you have them?”
All the women nodded.
“I think,” said the judge with that male decisiveness which always seems so lovable to women, “under the circumstances, if the jury is agreeable—”
The eight women jurors nodded. The four men jurors, after a hasty glance around, nodded also.
“—I shall dismiss the charges against the defendant, and I think I should direct somebody in authority to look into this whole matter of Tinkers—”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Lasia, brightly.
“I don’t!” Amazed.
“Every man in this room,” said Lasia, “will forget all about glids in ten minutes. That kind of information is not for the first race at all.”
“The first race?” said the judge, numbly.
“Men.”
After another silence, the judge said, “One more question while this matter is still fresh in my mind. Why did Mrs. Jono try to kill the good Tinker when she should have known better?”
“I’ll ask Tinker,” said Lasia. Which she did.
The Tinker said, “You requested me to help in the experiment. So I thought I would release her ability to show anger. That way, you would have a true feeling response from the victim for later evaluation.”
The spindly body did a variation of the human shrug. “My impression is that her husband seemed to be so much more interested when he was raping what he thought was a woman who was not his wife. Well, Mrs. Jono was outraged by his special enjoyment of the experience. Accordingly, when I came in, moments after he had gone, while you were watching Dr. Toh coming along the corridor, she tried to use the glid on me, which I don’t understand.” Baffled. “Why me?”
Lasia nodded wisely. “Of course,” she said, “a woman would. She can’t hurt him, so she strikes the first inanimate object.”
“But I’m not an inanimate object,” protested Tinker.
Lasia dismissed that with an important wave of one arm and hand.
Lasia always said, afterwards, that it wasn’t so much the trial that was a turning point in her understanding of human behavior, although it helped. What really shook her up was that Kinky, instead of being the totally supportive person that be had always seemed, when he heard of her arrest uttered two critical words that showed what his real opinion was under all that surface of apparent good will. The two words were, “You idiot!”
That was the cap, so to speak, on her doctorate. Within a week after the trial ended, she reopened her office and, apparently, the location was not too important.
The sign on her office door read:
LASIA MIGG, Ph.D. PSYCHOLOGIST.
Practice Limited to Training Men in Sexual Response.
She charged $3180 for six sessions of her brand of psychotherapy. In professional Woman’s Who’s Who, she was presently listed as the author of a number of widely used texts on the nature of human behavior. She called herself a Neo-Freudian, and her tour de force was MOTIVES FOR RAPISM: the Male Condition.
LIVING WITH JANE
By the time Jane was four and a half, she was explaining to visitors in a tone of voice that showed the subject was of great interest to her: “That man over there is not really my father. He’s an android—that’s a machine—who looks like my father, and he’s around all the time except when my father visits me. It’s good for a little girl to have either her father or a father-substitute with her day and night. It does something secure for me deep inside.”
She was also given to telling people that her real father and mother were divorced. And then she’d add, “What’s divorce?”
By age six, she had evidently been told that divorce resulted when your real parents didn’t like each other enough anymore. And so, one departed but retained visiting rights, and the other remained.
But, of course, these days the departed parent left behind an android who was a look-alike, so that his going wouldn’t bother the issue of the marriage.
“I’m the issue,” little Jane clarified, in case anyone was in doubt.
“The whole purpose of this,” she one day told Mrs. Jonathan, her grandmother on her mother’s side, “is to make sure that I grow up normal and don’t have any trauma about a missing father.”
At age nine, she said to that same over-fond grandparent, “Of course, it goes much deeper than that. At one time, children were casually denied parental closeness either by the accident of death, or the passion of divorce; or the parents would go out for the evening leaving a baby sitter to look after the children. In our advanced civilization of today, the baby sitters are two androids, one of whom looks like father and the other like mother. It’s an experiment on a mass scale. The hope is that we’ll grow up with a complete sense of inner security and with ego intact.”
If Jane noticed Grandmother Jonathan’s lips tighten whenever she mentioned her father, she showed no sign. And, of course, the older woman refrained, on stem instructions from her daughter, from ever voicing her negative opinion of a man who had divorced the most perfect girl in the world and deserted his daughter.
Grandmother was equally unhappy with the fact that, since the divorce, Alpha One had continued a secret (from Jane) affair with her ex-husband, giving him, as Mrs. Jonathan did not hesitate to say over and over again, “all the privileges of marriage and requiring from him none of the responsibilities.”
But there was no question as to when the real father was around. Real mother looked instantly brighter and happier. For Jane, her father’s coming was a mixed pleasure. Fine, okay, he’s fun. He radiates energy. The whole place is more alive. Unfortunately, he would get stuffy every once in awhile. Periodically, he wasted their time together by giving Jane a reeducation in the differences between real people and androids.
Jane’s father was officially employed as a government physicist, assigned to special projects. He understood androids inside out, so to speak. In his educating drills, he had the android duplicate of his ex-wife walk back and forth and up and down in front of Jane and himself, and he would point out with tiresome patience the slight forward tilt by which an android maintained its (her) balance, the hesitancy just before the head turned, and, oh, a half dozen other nonhuman characteristics which, it seemed to Jane, she knew right up to here.
Next, he had the android take off the stocking of the right foot and lie face down. Using a thin screwdriver, he removed a section of what looked like a flesh-and-blood woman’s heel. And there, revealed, was a tiny electronic switchboard.
The consequent education included what you did to reprogram the android, something which was usually done at the factory.
For some reason, the girl was resistant, not to learning programming, but to doing it. As she explained it, “I like androids. I’ve grown up with them. They’ve given me their time and their full attention always, as long as I wanted it. They read me stories when I was younger, played games with me ever since, and studied with me. In some ways, androids are more wonderful than people, and programming them is wrong, somehow.”
Her father explained patiently that the androids had been programmed to give exactly the kind of attention that Jane was praising.
Jane said she understood that, but that it made no difference in her feeling. “It tells us what they’re capable of. Human beings are not capable of things like that.” She finished, “As for identifying them from humans, that’s not a problem. They don’t think like us, and that shows in many ways.”
On the basis of that remark, which was reported to Dr. Camm, the psychologist tested her for ESP. The traditional tests showed no significant increase in her previous close-to-zero capability.
Jane was glad when that nonsense was over.
For several months there had been no visit from Daddy Dan, a fact which evoked private, acrid comments from Grandmother Jonathan, and distracted, griefy remarks from Alpha to the effect that “Dan is engaged on a secret project. He doesn’t want to take any chance of certain persons discovering that he has an ex-family. People have been arrested, and are to be tried.”
That was the year that Jane was fourteen. Alpha arrived home one midmorning to find her mother sitting in the living room with an unconcealed smile of triumph. “Do you notice any differences around here?” asked the older woman, with glowing satisfaction.
The young woman with the blonde hair and the face like an angel, glanced around expectantly. Her gaze came to where her husband’s duplicate stood with a faint smile on his face, so familiar, so exactly like Dan.
Exactly.
With a cry, Alpha ran toward him. “Dan!”
“Wait!” It was Mrs. Jonathan’s voice, sharp and commanding, the triumph gone, the smile faded. Alpha stopped.
Dan continued to stand with that engaging grin on his face. Seeing him, a thought flashed visibly into Alpha’s eyes. She went over to a chair and sat down abruptly.
As from a distance, she heard her mother describe, with the tone of satisfaction back in her voice, the details of her purchase of two androids who were so perfect that, Mrs. Jonathan ecstasized, “it’s impossible to tell which is you and which is the android.” She finished gleefully, “And what’s more, I got a good trade-in allowance on the others.”
“B-but,” Alpha began. And couldn’t go on.
She sat there, then, in a state of internal disaster. Her mother’s voice went on extolling the benefits of such masterful androids, as Alpha remembered the few remarks her husband had made about the assignment he was on, having to do with super-androids like this who were part of a conspiracy involving an organization called GALS, which was trying to take over the planet from human beings.
This was why he had stayed away—so that these beings would not discover he had a family.
As she cringed there on the settee, a tiny hope kept pushing at her. The hope grew big enough so that she got her voice back. She said, “Oh, Mother, I think you ought to return them at once. It was a wonderful thought, but they must have cost a fortune.”
If she could treat this in some normal way and not arouse the suspicions of the androids . . . that was her first terrified hope.
Desperately, remembering what a skinflint her mother was, except where her daughter and granddaughter were involved, she prodded at the aspect of cost. “What was the price?” she demanded.
It turned out that they had cost eighteen thousand dollars each.
“Mother!” screamed Alpha, “you’ve got to take them back.”
But Mrs. Jonathan was not to be swayed. “If the money your father left,” she said smugly, “isn’t for luxuries like this, what is it for?”
Another wild hope was suddenly in Alpha’s mind. “You forget,” she said, “that Jane is part of an experiment in child-raising where the real father is absent a great deal of the time. I can’t allow that experiment to be interfered with, unless Dr. Camm, the supervising psychologist, gives his consent.”
Having spoken the words, she was instantly convinced that she had found her correct argument. She parted her lips to press the point to a determined conclusion, but the older woman spoke first. “As you know,” said Mrs. Jonathan, “I was never happy with Jane being a guinea pig. But,” she climbed to her feet, “since you insisted, I think I’ve finally supplied what was missing from the experiment.”
She walked over to the patio room door. “Jane, will you bring your little friend in here?”
The words conveyed no meaning to Alpha. She had not the slightest inkling of the truth, so the surprise was total.
Jane walked in . . . followed by Jane.
“Of course,” were the first words Alpha heard as the shock waves finally receded, “normally Jane Two will be in her box in the basement when Jane One is here, and will come out only when Jane is at school. I always did have the feeling that it was just as good for a parent to have the children around as vice versa. And so,” firmly, “that’s another of my contributions to the happiness of this household.” She held up her hand. “Don’t thank me. Don’t say anything until you’ve tried it for awhile.” She walked to the door. “I’ll see you all again soon.”
She went out hastily, clearly anxious to escape any further dialogue.
As Alpha heard the outer door close, she swung about and looked at Dan Two. The super-android turned to Jane. He said, “Take Jane Two down and put her in her box, please.”
